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English people whose duties or interests place them in Berlin during the

first summer of the Occupation. They are involved with each other

through their position in occupied territory or through their

friendships, and by their interest in the fate of one German who has

been arrested and condemned. The action moves swiftly between the

ambitions and anxieties of a General, the curious intentions of a Very

Important Person, the feverish or helpless twistings of Germans trapped

by defeat, the education, friendships and loves of young men. As in

life, the private conflicts meet and distort the human relations. When

Major-General Lowerby's oldest and closest friendship gets in the way of

his ambitions, which does he choose? When William Gary, for whom human

beings have been instruments, tries to turn to a human loyalty and

devotion, can he escape the involuntary callousness of his own mind?

Colonel Brett stumbles over his own folly as much as his honesty. Lise

and Arnold, pretending to a sophistication neither has, have to find

their way back through separate disillusions, to the simplicity of their

young love.

The German characters are drawn with a

rare knowledge of the conflicts in the German soul: the polished

gentleman who will allow any crime for the sake of his family estate;

the wound-crippled boys, living on their wits, nerves and passions; the

man, at once scholar and brute, who is abandoning the West for the

despised and feared East. Behind the suspense of the narrative, and the

sharp images of ruin and fever, rises another image - the image, the

reality, of Europe, 1945

Autoren-Porträt von Margaret Storm Jameson

Storm Jameson was born in 1891 to a North Yorkshire family of shipbuilders. Jameson's fiery mother, who bore three girls, encouraged Storm (christened Margaret Storm) to pursue an education; after being taught privately and at Scarborough municipal school she won one of three county scholarships which enabled her to read English Literature at Leeds University. She then went on to complete an MA in European Drama at King's College London. During her career Jameson wrote forty-five novels, numerous pamphlets, essays, and reviews, in an effort to make money. Her personal life suffered, and her first marriage to schoolmaster Charles Douglas Clarke was an unhappy one. After they divorced in 1925, Jameson went on to marry Guy Chapman, a fellow author, and remained with him despite her apparent rejection of normal domestic life. Storm Jameson was always politically active, helping to publish a Marxist journal in the British section of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in 1934 and attending anti-fascist rallies. She died in 1986.